the camaraderie, the determination, the buzz oilly made them feel worse. 1 had to remind myseJf that what we were talk- ing about was, after all, a debt-collection agenc Wayne Learned, the first person Bart- mann hired in 1990, when he moved the company to Tulsa, agreed: that was the wonder of it. Before he met Bart- mann, Learned had been the executive vice-president of Oklahoma's largest retail bank, where he had presided over fifty branch offices and a thousand em- ployees. By the time C.F.S. folded, Learned was the director of operations, with a salary of half a million dollars a year. But he had originally taken a sub- stantial pay cut when he joined C.ES., and he had done so, he told me, oilly be- cause of the way Bartmann answered him at their first interview; when Learned asked him to describe his "vision" of the 1 \ r' [, 1 .- I '""). \ ,:,,;,,' ,,", m ,;rC ;fit;,: \ (" "\, ",:' ,,:" l>;i:", <Y' "', " A'" .' r" '/"I '{) }' " ';'mri ;iill:;?" }:' , ' '" \ ,; { :; : I ',< ^ r, ! r:vf \: i: J , I '" \' ' i_, r ; . -. : þ ' ;., .t ' ' ':: - ' - ' " ,>,j ,.:.., , \-'::';_"':" """"" " \" " w ,; j \ .". :" .E Ji,',":; <- I m 9:\ \ , "" , ,; ,.', :-\ , \,' l . company's future: "He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, 'Some da Rich- ard Nixon and Henry Kissinger will work for us, and they'll be responsible for collecting debt from Third World countries.' And it struck me very power- fully, because, while it's an insane state- ment on its face, 1 knew what he meant. 1 mean, it just so illustrated Bill's goal to be different and to think outside the box." Learned trailed off Then, sound- ing like Conrad's Marlow speaking of Kurtz, he said, "Oh, it was just the power to-the power of what he said." I spent a week in Tulsa talking to people about Bill Bartmann, and although many had a vivid sense of his presence, and most spoke of him on a first-name basis, 1 had the impression that the truest thing 1 heard said about him was a remark by the Chamber of , .. , . I ", ft ' : .: '-..':-:"-". ., .::.. :..:: . f,,:t ,._, , '\#)? (. W" .n, ì }"\':J.' ;!;, . . :"'4 .t - 'T lit I .. - ä\. t " 'n ' \;:':'\ " , , 1 r oo;, c.": .-/ " '"'-""" ø. '\ I t;.: ....'WX( .:::' . :-: ..: };$ - -- J r, 'f ,tr' I;: æ . ",; w; ,; iF'} , í/ ::" . 1l \ ;.;t , , WA " ' \fÆ I =t " , , - . .., wo, I .., " l' :"""""" _ , :J -, ,1 ., .. . . . . .. r If 0. -- ,. ! It . _ , í I ' I , .". It #.fÆ.:"" '< ) ; , 'ié I - \; "We hated them long before anyone else. " Commerce man, Mickey Thompson, who told me, "1 don't know of anybody who knows Bartmann that well." When I asked Bartmann about that, he said Thompson was right. His life was dedicated to his business, he said, and friendship "creates a different burden, a different relationship, that clouds the employer-employee business relation- ship." So, except for the socializing that business requires, he doesn't care to hang out with anyone but his wife and two daughters and a few buddies with whom he rides Harley- Davidsons. At C.F.S., Bartmann recalled, the company brass would go on quarterly strategic-planning retreats, where each participant would be asked to draw up lists of the company's strengths and weaknesses, and he told me, ' ost al- ways, item No.1 on both was Bill Bart- mann." He described the company as "absolutely Bill-dependent," and he said, "1 probably created that, not knowing how not to." But he said that he had ex- perienced "an epiphany of sorts" in the wake of C.F:S.'s demise, and "come to understand how hollow fame and good fortune really are. The new company's going to be, 1 hope, remarkably differ- ent-less about me, less about Bill Bart- mann, and more about Just let's get a mission, let's get the job done." As he said this, we were oilly a few blocks away from the blinding gold-glass towers that C.ES. used to occupy; we sat at a bare conference table, in his new corporate headquarters, a modest six- room suite in a one-story prefab office block, adjacent to a Git 'n' Go in one of Tulsàs ubiquitous strip malls. The place had the fluorescent, unadorned atmo- sphere of a startup dentist's office, which fÌtwith Bartmann's professed newfound humility. But Bartmann's ambitions sounded, if anything, more grandiose than ever. While he said that the fringe- banking industry as a whole was de- signed to "screw the wheels" off poor people, he described his purpose in start- ing Neighborhood Financial Center as a sort of economic humanitarianism-to rescue a clientele composed largely of those who have never known anything but economic hardship and exclusion. As Bartmann described this new "mission" to me, his speech took on the rhythms of the pulpit: "You got to reach down and save them, you lower a ladder